The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Prime

I still really enjoyed the first season.

I don't think the hated from Tolkien fans is unanimous though, one of my friends is very much a Tolkien and lore fan and he enjoyed it.

Nah, I get it. Its the kind of bad that can wind you up. Its expensive, based on a property with infinite possibilities and has one of the greatest adaptations ever under its belt but you're forced to spend seven episodes shouting 'ITS CLEARLY GANDALF' at the screen. 

Its almost aggressively boring.

Yeah, that's it exactly. Its like when you go to poundland and end up thinking 'the earths resources were sacrificed to make all of this badly made shite'. Like the planet would be a better place if Rings of Power hadn't been made.

It was boring enought to the point I gave up on it without regret. So there is that.

All I can really remember of it now was a really long transition scene of people riding horses and enjoying it very much. I mean the bit in The Two Towers where Shadowfax turns up and Gandalf spends a bit too long twatting on about him like he's giving him a WWE ring entrance was odd, but nothing like that.

Hopefully they found some writers who can write a coherent plot for the second season.

Hopefully Sauron won't be played by the guy from season one. I think he was possibly the least convincing thing about all of it.

I liked it when the man used the sword but but it was a volcano key and made Mordor.

You've not watched the new trailer then?  Some great make up to make him even more bland.

I thought the first season was really weird - like others have said, narratively wonky with odd characterisation. Despite being the most expensive TV series ever made, it also looked really cheap - every separate narrative strand had, like, one set each (Durin's one room! The humans' one courtyard! The elves' one bandstand thing next to a tree!). But, y'know, some alright action and mystery and stuff I guess.

As someone who has read all the appendices and has a relatively decent idea of the "story", it was very, very strange. I don't really understand some of the choices they've made; the parts of the narrative (such as it is) that they've rushed through, the parts that they're really dragging out. I think I see where they're going with Numenor, but it feels very odd to me; and none of the stuff with the elves and the dwarves really feels like the source material. Galadriel is not at all how I imagine her from reading Tolkien (she's about a foot too short for a start). Now, none of that should matter if the story the show is telling is good and makes sense in and of itself, but I'm not sure that's the case; so they've got a so-so fantasy story for the norms, but one that's really just going to piss-off the die-hard fans.

The one thing that I did like - mostly - was the "Gandalf" stuff (I assume it's Gandalf and not Saruman because I think Gandalf is supposed to have more of an affinity for fire? And this dude was using fire magic?). Showing how the wizards came to Middle-earth and the "origin" of Gandalf is quite an interesting wrinkle to explore. It's still a bit weird how they've gone about it, and I don't think the different threads tie together yet at all, and I really, really don't understand the timeline. But, y'know, it is what it is. I'm going to watch season two at any rate.

It had Lenny Henry and they didn’t even have him run a pirate radio station. What a missed opportunity.

I thought you were joking.

Why the fuck is Tom Bombadill in this?

Am I right in thinking that Amazon have the rights to The Lord of the Rings? As in, not any of his other books? So all of this is coming from the appendices rather than the Silmarillion?

I'm sure I read that somewhere. It's the only explanation for why they didn't just do a story about Ungoliant, Mother of Spiders.

Iirc they have access to names mentioned in LotR, The Hobbit, and the appendices of those books. But they can't film the stories of those books, because the film adaptation rights are held by someone else. I think they asked if they could just do a TV version of the books instead, and were told no.

And then you'd think "ok, well, they can just do a prequel using all the stories published after Tolkien's death, in the Simarillion and whatnot". But no, they can't do that either, because the Tolkien Estate won't sell those rights for any price, to anyone.

So, basically, they have to make their own prequel story "inspired" by Lord of the Rings. They can use character names from the books, though obviously limited to people that were alive hundreds of years before the events in LotR. But they can't directly adapt any of the actual stories written by Tolkien about that time, and are reduced to leaving little hints about it here and there.

If that sounds like a huge fucking mess... it is. It's a show written by lawyers, cobbled together from scraps.

Honestly, I feel a bit bad for whoever is trying to write this. Because you've got the fans on one side who want to see their favourite stories on the screen, and the suits on the other side shaking their heads like the IRS lawyers telling Krusty the Clown that they can't afford to have pies thrown on his show. It's literally impossible to please everyone.

But then I ask "well why the fuck did they agree to this deal in the first place, how on earth are these scraps worth the $250m Amazon paid for them". It's probably Bezos's fault.